The Reading List

February 2019 | The Devil’s Alliance by Roger Moorhouse

My knowledge of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939-41 has always been fairly limited. Basically whatever some general historian decided to provide in a chapter of his work. This time I decided to read a little more deeply into it and finished this book this month. It starts pretty much in the early months of 1939 and then ends as Barbarossa engulfs the Soviets. No good guys in this book, both sides were pricks.

January 2019 | The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester

Every now and then I get tired of Nazis and branch out into something else. Always non-fiction and almost always history. This is a great read if you at at all interested in how the world moved from a ancient/medieval view of the planet to a modern one.

December 2018 | The Gestapo: A History of Horror by Jacques Delarue

This book was first published in 1962 and is starting to show its age. I found many details missing or out-of-date although it did lead me down a rabbit warren researching the widespread murder of SS men by SA after the Night of the Long Knives.

December 2018 | Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

November 2018 | The Knights of Bushido by Lord Russell of Liverpool

The first time I read this book, I think I was in high school, it affected me greatly. The fact that my own grandfather had served in the Pacific and had fought this culture made it very personal. Lord Russell was heavily involved in the prosecution of war criminals during the IMT trials in the late 40’s and his dispassionate recounting of the brutality of the Japanese in this volume is pretty bloody horrific.